Tham khảo tài liệu '21st century manufacturing episode 1 part 10', kỹ thuật - công nghệ, cơ khí - chế tạo máy phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 174 Semiconductor Manufacturing Chap. 5 some companies such as Intel Compaq Deli and Gateway have understood and exploited this new landscape whereas other companies such as Apple have had more mixed success in recent years. THE MICROELECTRONICS REVOLUTION The key to building faster cheaper smaller and more powerful computers is to miniaturize electronic circuit components. Smaller devices have superior performance characteristics more components in a small area increase the circuit s energy efficiency and processing speed. The usual way to measure miniaturization is by the length Lc of the polysilicon gate bridging the source and drain region of a transistor. This dimension is shown in later figures. A key component of an integrated circuit IC is the transistor. Transistors are the largest member of a family of sohd-state devices called semiconductors. They are built from a special class of materials with electrical properties somewhere between those of conductors and those in insulators. Pure semiconductor material exhibits high resistance which can be lowered by adding small amounts of impurities called dopants. When fabricating an integrated circuit the transistors resistors and capacitors as well as their interconnections are fabricated together integrated in a continuous substrate of semiconductor material. Active circuit elements are formed by doping selected regions of the material. Silicon is by far the most commonly used semiconductor substrate material because it has overall cost performance and processing advantages. With each new IC generation device geometries have become smaller and ICs have become more powerful. In 1965 Gordon E. Moore then with Fairchild Corporation but later an Intel cofounder observed an important trend that was later elevated to a law in the popular electronics press. He predicted that the number of transistors that could be integrated on a single die would grow exponentially with time roughly doubling every 18 to 24 months.
